I have read a number of emotionally harrowing slave narratives, so I was at first taken aback by Whitehead's style. So matter-of fact that it does seem, as another reviewer already mentioned, rather impersonal and almost cold, it allows Whitehead to show that this was the status-quo - for both sides. The author depicts a world so permeated by violence that distancing oneself from any emotions was one of the means to survive. Horrific violence is endured by onlookers; the threat of torture and death is so omnipresent that investing any feelings in fear would only eat away the last resources. Written in a third-person narrative, Whitehead offers a detailed picture of slavery without allowing us to cloud our view by tears of sympathy or turning away at the view of burned bodies. By doing so, he also denies us the comfort of emotion, which makes it almost even more harrowing than any narrative in which we are released by crying over the protagonists' fate.

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